A few have suggested it, might as well test the waters. The idea is to give people who haven't read the books a safe place to talk about the show.

A few quick ground rules:

No Spoilers!!!!! for upcoming episodes.

Larger Song of Ice and Fire discussion should be limited to the other thread although I think a tiny bit of book delving to fill in holes should be okay (example of this would be talking about Catelyn and her treatment of the wolves in the novel, which was alluded to on TV but never really made clear...)

Everything that happened that week is fair game once an episode airs. So if you don't watch on Sunday night, I'd stay outta here until you do...

They did a poor job of explaining Jon Snow's part I thought, but basically Quorin Halfhand wanted Jon to join the wildlings to get information, and he wanted to avoid being tortured to death, so he staged the anger toward Jon and the fight so Jon would kill him and the wildlings would accept Jon as a traitor to the NW and let him join the wildlings. But Quorin reminds Jon of his NW vows as he is dying.

I got that - didn't think it was that confusing. Though after last episode this one was kind of anti-climactic.

That was fun! Loved the Iron Maiden zombie white walker thing at the end, he looked cool.

Loved the dragons lighting up that creepy ass Pyatt Pree and then Dany locking Xaro and the traitor woman in the wall safe. Dany can be downright cruel if you cross her, just like when Viserys got killed or she burned that witch alive that killed Drogo and her son.

They did a poor job of explaining Jon Snow's part I thought, but basically Quorin Halfhand wanted Jon to join the wildlings to get information, and he wanted to avoid being tortured to death, so he staged the anger toward Jon and the fight so Jon would kill him and the wildlings would accept Jon as a traitor to the NW and let him join the wildlings. But Quorin reminds Jon of his NW vows as he is dying.

Quorin knew he was likely dead and he saw the value of Jon going undercover within the wildling army (he says so in a previous episode). He had a feeling they would accept Jon if he killed one of his own. It was much more clear in the book what was going on there.

That was one of the detriments of only having 10 episodes. They didn't really have time to establish who Quorin was, just how much of a badass he really was and then set up his sacrifice in the end. That's one of the few real missed beats they've had in the series so far. That's such a pivotal part of the book, and for setting up Jon's role in the next book(s). It will work out fine in the end, I think, they'll get to the same point, but I thought it could have been done much better than it was.

The tv show doesn't do a very good job of bringing out Danny's character IMHO. I can see where someone that hasn't read the books wouldn't be too impressed by her so far.

I would argue it's the opposite. I think she's been a much better character on tv than she ever was in the books to this point. If I remember right, she was even lower on my list at the end of book 2 than Sansa (with whom they've also done a better job).

Her story never took off for me until book 3. Prior to that, my reactions were usually between "oh shit another dany chapter" and *flips 20 pages forward to something interesting*.

Aside from the House of the Undying, which was so incredibly more cool in the book than it was on TV. Although I understand why they removed all the foreshadowing.